


Rivalry Night

by AuthorToBeNamedLater



Series: Keeping Up With The Raptors [12]
Category: Hockey RPF, No Fandom, Original Work, Sports RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hockey, Alternate Universe - Sports, Fights, Gen, Hockey, Humor, National Hockey League, Raptors, Rivalry, Seattle, Sports, Team Dynamics, Vancouver, Vancouver Canucks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-21
Updated: 2013-07-21
Packaged: 2017-12-20 22:48:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/892809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuthorToBeNamedLater/pseuds/AuthorToBeNamedLater
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was a truth universally acknowledged that anyone who had anything to do with hockey outside of British Columbia despised the Vancouver Canucks.</p><p>Another truth universally acknowledged was that anyone who had anything to do with hockey inside of Washington state despised the Vancouver Canucks more than the rest of the NHL put together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rivalry Night

**Author's Note:**

> Rivalry Night is real, as are all the broadcasters featured herein (though if you got to this through Hockey RPF you already knew that). I thought about making up my own team, but it would just sound like all these guys in my head anyway, so I decided what the heck.
> 
> AuthorToBeNamedLater has nothing against the Vancouver Canucks. Actually...yes she does, but that's not the point. It fit that Vancouver and Seattle would be rivals, and I played it up. The only real Canuck with a part in this story is Burrows because it was too easy. Read and find out why.
> 
> The author does hate the Habs, but there's no apologizing for or explaining that :).

It was a truth universally acknowledged that anyone who had anything to do with hockey outside of British Columbia despised the Vancouver Canucks.

Another truth universally acknowledged was that anyone who had anything to do with hockey inside of Washington state despised the Vancouver Canucks more than the rest of the NHL put together.

Ugur Bozkurt's Turkish parents had settled in Victoria, British Columbia. As such Ugur had grown up a Canucks fan. However, the wily winger's childhood allegiances had faded fast once he hit the NHL.

Prior to joining the Raptors Ugur had played for the Toronto Maple Leafs and had to deal with the Montreal Canadiens six games per year. Ugur found everything about the Habs tiring. The diving, the embellishing, the whining, the dirty play, the histrionics from fans every time a Canadien got hit...it all made him want to tell the entire province of Quebec to get over itself.

The Vancouver Canucks were no better. The culture surrounding the team wasn't anything like Montreal, but the attitude was right up there. The Raptors and Canucks management hated each other plenty as well: In 1971 the NHL had snubbed Seattle's request for a franchise in favor of Vancouver. The Raptors had come along five years later, but no one had forgotten the snub. No matter how you looked at it the two teams were primed to for rivalry.

 _It's not a bad way to start the road trip,_ Ugur thought. _Things can only go uphill from here._

.

.

.

In the broadcast booth at Rogers Arena, Mike “Doc” Emrick sat to the right of his color man, Eddie Olczyk with in-game reporter Pierre McGuire at ice level. The trio had been handling hockey on NBCSports (or as Emrick liked to think of it, the network formerly known as Versus) for years, and this Wednesday they had Rivalry Night duties covering the Seattle Raptors and the Vancouver Canucks.

“So, it is the Vancouver Canucks and the Seattle Raptors at Rogers Arena in Vancouver tonight,” Emrick announced when the broadcast started. “Pierre, what can we expect in tonight's installment of the longest-standing and nastiest rivalry in the West?”

“Well, there's no doubt in anybody's mind that these two teams hate each other,” The bald, bespactacled Pierre McGuire commented from his spot at ice level. “It's been there since the beginning when the NHL snubbed Seattle to put a franchise in Canada. The Canucks are coming off something of a rebuild; after they lost to Los Angeles in the first round last season they fired head coach Alain Vigneault and parted with almost half their roster, most notably the Sedin twins and Roberto Luongo, all of whom went to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

“But there is still plenty of bad blood to go around. These two clubs usually jockey for the first and second spot in the division, and it was just 2011 that the Canucks dropped the Raptors to ninth in the West and denied Seattle a playoff spot for the first time in 15 years. So there is no love lost and no feelings spared between these two teams. Tonight we can expect a lot of emotion and a lot of penalties. Will we see a lot of scoring? That depends on whose system wins out. William LaJeunesse's Raptors are known for preventing scoring opportunities and trying to keep their opponents far away from Sandy Garneau. Jeff Trembley's Canucks tend to rely on netting so many goals that the other team just can't keep up.”

The camera cut away from McGuire.

“Eddie, these two teams have both had decent starts to the year.” Emrick turned to his broadcast partner and Hall-of-Famer Eddie Olczyk. “Where do you see them tonight and what might this game, their first meeting, tell us about the rest of the season?”

“These are two very good hockey teams,” Olczyk explained over the crowd noise behind the two commentators. “It's still early in the season but you can already see the one-two battle getting going. One thing everyone highlights is that the Raptors are tougher than the Canucks, which they probably are. Vancouver has a few pests, but they don't really have a Zhenya Rusakov style enforcer. They have big guys, but no power forwards like Kris Stefansson or Stan Cibulka. If Seattle can exploit that, Vancouver could be in a lot of trouble.

“On the other hand, Vancouver made some big adjustments this offseason. They added younger, speedy guys like Jon Robertson, Richard Desmarais, and Ornulf Lindgren in the trade with Toronto. The Raptors are not so speedy. Hank Sheridan, Andor Ronningen and Tim Keller are all over 40. Zhenya Rusakov's about to turn 39. These guys are all still great players but not one of them is as fast as he used to be. If Vancouver finds their rhythm early on Seattle will be hard-pressed to keep up, because they're good but they are not fleet of foot.

“And let's not forget Vancouver landed Scott Everard as a free agent back in July. With the questions surrounding Sandy Garneau after the Cup final last year, this is the first time in quite a few years that we can't say Seattle has the clear goaltending advantage.”

Emrick turned back to the camera. “It's always entertaining when Seattle and Vancouver collide and we don't expect tonight to be any different. We'll be back with NBCSports' Rivalry Night right after this.”

.

.

.

Joshua Rodney Bernier was 35 years old and at first blush seemed to have “Fuck Off” stamped across his forehead. “Bernie” wasn't the world's biggest people person. He disliked press conferences, hated giving interviews, and sported a permanent crease in his brow that added to his acerbic countenance. But his teammates and those who knew him understood his first impression wasn't correct at all. Josh's exterior hid a dry, biting wit that made the Raptors' dressing room a more tolerable place.

Josh also had a long-standing love/hate (as in, he loved to hate) relationship with Canucks star Alexandre Burrows. And their lines just happened to be matched up to start the game.

Kris Stefansson and Teddy Beach got to yapping and both got tossed out of the faceoff circle. Burrows and Josh came in to replace them.

This was just asking for it. “Save me a dance, Burrows?” Josh chirped.

“Bite me, Bernier,” Burrows growled.

“Gentlemen...” Referee Dan Gove warned.

“I'm not the one with biting problems on this faceoff dot,” Josh continued. During the 2011 Cup final, Burrows had bitten Patrice Bergeron, through his glove, hard enough to make the Bruins' center bleed. Burrows and everyone else in Vancouver denied the story, despite numerous videos and photos that showed both Burrows' teeth around Bergeron's glove and Bergeron's finger bleeding afterward.

Burrows rolled his eyes.

“You boys ready?” Gove asked.

Josh couldn't stop. “You know, in the animal kingdom only the females bite and--”

Burrows leaped across the faceoff circle and gave Josh a cross-check to the face.

.

.

.

“And this game is off to a splendid start,” Emrick commented dryly as Josh Bernier took Alex Burrows' stick to his nose. Bernier grabbed his face and went down. Before anyone could react, Bernier bounded off the ice and charged at Burrows. The two scrapped for a few seconds before the linesmen separated them. Gove ejected both forwards from the dot. They were still jawing at one another as their linemates came in to take the draw.

“That's not the sort of thing you want to do,” Olczyk said. “I don't know what Bernier was saying, but you don't want to get a guy mad enough to get a stick in the face before the game even starts.”

The puck dropped and the game was underway.

.

.

.

The first period went about like Raptors/Canucks games usually did: Each team spending a lot of time in the others' zone, each goalie having to stand on his head, the crowd _Ooooh-_ ing at every shot like it was a Stanley Cup Final game, and plenty of trash talk on both sides.

LaJeunesse would never say it in public, but he hated coaching games like this. Emotions ran high and he had to make sure his boys didn't take dumb penalties and give the high-octane Vancouver power play a chance. And he had to make sure that he didn't lose his cool, either. Especially since NBC had the bright idea of miking the coaches tonight.

As the clock ticked toward the final minute of the scoreless first period, Vancouver's Joonas Ukkola delivered a nasty cross-check to Simon Moreau and sent the Raptors' fourth-liner sliding into the boards where he stayed for too many seconds. The referee blew the whistle.

“What the _fuck,_ Ukkola?!” Mikey Palmer hollered from his spot on the bench.

“Mikey...” LaJeunesse warned.

Doc made her way off the bench, but by the time she hit the ice Simon was up and moving.

“Jesus, he broke his stick on Morrie,” Hannu Numminen muttered.

LaJeunesse saw Ukkola's lumber lying in two pieces on the ice.

.

.

.

“Samantha Richardson is coming off the bench to get a look at Moreau,” Emrick said, watching the Raptors' athletic trainer navigate the ice toward the ailing player. Moreau stood up on his own and was skating to the bench before Richardson could get to him.

“The only female trainer in the National Hockey League,” Doc went on, “hailing from Brookline, Massachusetts and she's got a Boston accent to rival Andy Brickley's.” Brickley was the Boston Bruins' color commentator. It had never been confirmed, but many people believed he got passed over for national jobs because of his hard Boston accent.

Moreau met Richardson halfway between the ice and the bench and nodded at whatever she asked him.

“You know, they call her 'Doc' too, right?” Olczyk put in to break the silence while Moreau gingerly made his way back to his teammates..

“A fine nickname,” Emrick chuckled. “Very common among athletic trainers and play-by-play announcers.”

.

.

.

By the time Simon Moreau got back to the bench the worst of the pain had faded. “I think I'm OK,” he told Doc.

“All right, I'm still gonna want a look at you back in the room, OK?” Doc carefully patted Simon's shoulder.

“Take the rest of the period off, Simon; I'll have Hannu double for you,” Coach said.

Simon nodded. He was now sure he hadn't broken anything, but his ribcage still protested every breath he took.

“What, no penalty?!” Janko Rybar exclaimed.

“Are you shitting me?!” Jones chimed in.

Simon squinted at the ice. _Really?_

“Hey—hey!” Coach tried to summon one of the officials as his bench made their displeasure known, but no dice.

“Bullshit,” Josh muttered.

“Hannu!” Coach barked. “Get out there; finish his shift.”

The stocky Finn nodded and climbed over the boards.

.

.

.

The period ended with both teams pushing the puck around and not doing much. When the siren sounded and the players made their way to their respective dressing rooms, Simon hissed in pain when he tried to stand.

“Yep, definitely taking a look,” Doc said. “Come on, Morrie.”

LaJeunesse caught his opposite number out of the corner of his eye and felt his temper flare. He'd never liked Jeff Trembley even before they became rival coaches. The guy ran his mouth and acted like a stooge. And he was a jerk.

And now he was giving LaJeunesse a smug look.

“This is why everybody hates you!” LaJeunesse barked at Parson. “You get that, right?”

.

.

.

Between the two benches, McGuire stared straight ahead, bit his cheek, and did everything in his power not to laugh.

There was silence in his headphones for a few moments before the famously eloquent Emrick could only come up with a feeble _“Oh my.”_

.

.

.

 _That was a dipshit move,_ LaJeunesse acknowledged to himself as he walked down the tunnel. _Maybe I got lucky and they'd already gone to commercial._

_Aw, Milbury's gonna have a field day with this._

.

.

.

In the NBC Sports studio, Liam McHugh waited, with Mike Milbury and Keith Jones to his left, for the green light to start the intermission report.

“Good evening, everyone,” McHugh started. “And welcome to the Bud Light Intermission Report. I'm Liam McHugh here alongside Mike Milbury and Keith Jonrd. We don't have any goals to talk about, but there's plenty of material here anyway.” McHugh looked to Milbury. “Mike, we talked before the game about the level and type of play we can expect from these teams...how did they do in your view?”

“They did about what we'd expect, which is conduct themselves poorly,” The Bostonian began in his typical no-nonsense style. “This--” the monitor showed Ukkola hitting Moreau “--this is just disgraceful. There's no cause to hit a guy from behind so hard that you break your stick on his ribs. That should have been a penalty. Look at this.” Moreau slowly got to his feet and made his way to the bench. “This is typical of Joonas Ukkola, the little punk. That should have been a minimum of two minutes, and the refs either don't notice or don't care

“But let's not pretend Seattle was squeaky clean. Will LaJeunesse had this gem for us.”

The three broadcasters waited a minute while LaJeunesse's _“This is why everybody hates you! You get that, right?”_ sound byte played over the airwaves.

“There's no cause for that either,” Milbury went on. “The guy's wearing a mic and he knows whatever he says is going to get broadcast to the entire US and Canada. And, you're representing your team, buddy. You're the coach. Act like it. LJ's lost a lot of clout if he wants to give it to his team for their conduct, or Vancouver for theirs.”

McHugh took a moment to contemplate Mike Milbury giving anyone broadcast etiquette lessons. “Keith?”

“Yeah, that's...that's not a good idea,” Keith Jones, former Philadelphia Flyer, said. “It's one thing when players chirp or take questionable shots, but to snap at the other coach when he hasn't even said anything you, _and_ you're wearing a mic—not William LaJeunesse's smartest move.”

“All right.” McHugh looked at his analysts. Jones looked quietly displeased. Milbury was shaking his head in disgust. “We're going to break, let Mike's blood pressure settle a little.” Jones and Milbury chuckled. “Rivalry Night on NBCSports will be back right after this.”

.

.

.

 _Focus. Play your game, don't play theirs. Get to them, don't let them get to you._ Hank replayed the high points of Coach's intermission speech in his head. Simon was fine, it turned out, just a bad bruise and he was good to go for the second.

“You ever wonder if this is what hell would be like?” Hank mused as he and Andor waited in the tunnel for the second period. “An eternal game at Rogers Arena?”

Andor snorted. “At least purgatory.”

Hank looked over his shoulder. “I'm Protestant. We don't have purgatory.”

“Oh.” Andor paused. “Must be nice.”

“It is.”

.

.

.

The second period cooled off considerably, Canucks and Raptors both seeming to have blown off a little steam in the first. Vancouver scored first, Seattle following 30 seconds later and scoring the go-ahead goal two minutes after that.

Janko Rybar blasted a shot from the point that Canucks' goalie Scott Everard knocked down. Mikey pounced on the rebound and Everard scrambled to smother the puck. Both teams swarmed the net following the referee's whistle.

A stick poked Janko under the chin and he swatted it away. The stick came back and Janko looked to his left and saw Brad Dorcas. Maybe the agitator was trying to get Janko, maybe he wasn't, but the burly Slovak wasn't having it.

Janko closed his glove around Dorcas' stick, waited until he had the forward's attention, and said “Keep this to yourself.”

.

.

.

Emrick stifled a laugh as he watched Janko Rybar grab the shaft of Matt Dorcas' stick and give the Canucks' pest a stern talking-to.

“Janko Rybar has had quite enough of this,” the play-by-play man announced. Dorcas took his stick back and gave the much larger Rybar a dirty look.

“But Dorcas isn't gonna fight,” Olczyk remarked.

“Oh, no,” Emrick chuckled. “No, he's smarter than that.” Rybar didn't let loose often, but when he did there wasn't a player in the league who wanted to face his wrath.

.

.

.

Neither team scored for the rest of the game, enabling the Raptors to take their 2-1 victory on the road to Los Angeles. There had been penalties, including one point near the end where each team had two players in the box for nearly a minute, and a lot of irked tempers, but neither goalie allowed anything through.

Before the Raptors could hit the road, LaJeunesse had to meet with the media. And he had a pretty good idea what they'd ask. He answered the normal questions about what went right, what went wrong, which player did his best and who phoned it in before a blond female with a TSN badge asked, “Will, any comments on your...comment to Jeff Trembley at the end of the first?”

LaJeunesse had known this was coming. “Well...” he fished for the right words. “You know, sometimes in the heat of the moment you just forget that you're on national television.”

It was a lame excuse. But it was the only one LaJeunesse had.

.

.

.

 _Well, that's over._ Tim Keller thought. The aging D-man sat back in his seat as the charter flight reached cruising altitude.

“Keller?”

“Yo.” Tim shifted his attention from the window to Greger Borgstrom.

The newly acquired player leaned around his seat, kitty-corner from Tim. “Is it always like that?”

“Yes,” Tim answered without hesitation.

“Yup,” Zhenya agreed.

“All the damn time,” Sandy grumbled.

“Sometimes it's worse,” Andor offered.

“English-speaking Habs,” Ugur said. When everyone else looked at him, he clarified. “That's what the Canucks are. English-speaking Habs.”

There was silence for a moment before Greger said, “Wow.”

The other Raptors within earshot laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> Seattle really did have a failed bid for an NHL franchise in 1976, but the league did not scrap it in favor of Vancouver. I made that up.
> 
> Andy Brickley really is the Bruins' color man and he really does have an absolutely comical Boston accent, and people really do think it's why he doesn't have a national gig. We in Boston are just as happy to have him all to ourselves.
> 
> Burrows really did bite Bergeron's finger. Or not, depending on whose side you're on.


End file.
